FINDING WINE FOR MY WEDDING IN TEHRAN
By Azadeh Moaveni
International Herald Tribune
nion/edmoaveni.php
Jan 30 2009
France
As a young Californian I always assumed I would be married at a
winery or on an island, places where wedding planning does not involve
separate reception halls for men and women and pre-emptive security
against a morality-police raid. But I met my future husband while
living in Iran. We spent one of our first dates combing the fruit
bazaars of Tehran for wine grapes. We crushed them by hand in the
gentle summer heat and spent solicitous afternoons over our single
barrel as a pretext for further courtship.
All of this convinced me that the prohibition of alcohol in Iran,
while inconvenient, was not altogether unromantic. Buying five cases
of red wine at once is, however, virtually impossible, as I discovered
before my Tehran wedding in 2005.
Most Iranians don’t serve drinks at weddings: Official banquet halls
have laws, extra bribery is required in case of a raid and there’s
a belief that guests tend to brawl at wet receptions (macho culture
and liquor do not mix well). Yet I desperately wanted drinks at my
reception, as did my fiance, Arash. In fact, I wanted a proper bar,
staffed by the city’s best bartenders, two Afghan brothers from Herat
who mixed a mean martini.
My Iranian future in-laws frowned on the idea, which actually mattered
quite a lot, since in Iran it is customary for the groom’s family
to plan and pay for the wedding. Having recently suffered the acute
boredom of two dry weddings, I was determined to make alcohol my
battle. Most Iranian brides seek a major concession over an extravagant
wedding dress or a set of jewelry, but I cut back on nearly everything
else to help leverage a bar.
I won out in the end, but that turned out to be the easy part. The
first dealer I called was an Armenian called Edo. The state permits
Christians (less than 1 percent of the population) to make and consume
alcohol, so bootleggers are usually Armenian Christians or Muslims
using Armenian names. Edo was incredulous. "You want 60 bottles of
wine? I’m sorry, but that sounds like a trap," he said, hanging
up. I asked one of my cousins to introduce me to her bootlegger,
Joseph. But we soon learned that he had been caught by the police with
a trunkload of whiskey. (He resumed dealing after one of his clients,
a well-placed judge, intervened.)
Growing desperate, I went to an Armenian friend. Her best connection
was named Edgar, she told me. He’d printed glossy catalogs of his
stock; like that of most dealers, it was smuggled across the Iraqi
border from the Kurdish city Sulaimaniya. But Edgar was preparing
to emigrate to Glendale, California. She suggested I try a family
friend whose name even I had heard. Before 1979, this friend ran one
of Tehran’s leading hair salons, but after the revolution banned males
from tending female hair, he was forced into private house calls. Soon
he began supplying his clients with homemade vodka and wine as well as
blowouts. When I tracked him down, he said that to supply what I needed
he would have to go to untested vintners (housewives who fermented
in their garages) and wouldn’t be able to guarantee the quality.
In the end, I realized I had to delegate the task to my aunts,
who after 30 years of Islamic prohibition had established their
own trusted connections and means of giving a large party with
drinks. On the day of our wedding, I was astonished by what they
managed. At the conclusion of our ceremony, I thought I would not
feel such joy for a long time to come – until someone handed me a
glass of Champagne. Throughout the evening, guests mingled about the
Persian gardens with their glasses glinting in the moonlight. Older
women who rarely drank did that night, as word spread that the Afghan
bartenders were serving anything you could want, from kir royales to
pomegranate martinis.
I didn’t think acquiring alcohol in Iran could get any harder, but
when I returned from London to spend three weeks in Tehran this past
month, I found my friends busy hoarding liquor. The government usually
tightens its controls in advance of Ramadan and Muharram, but the mood
last month was especially stern. State television showed cautionary
footage of bootleggers being arrested, their sinful beverages emptied
into the gutter. Watching the scenes, I couldn’t help thinking of
the night that my husband and I were married. Everyone was awash
in shiny-eyed nostalgia, embraced by memories of life before the
revolution, when drinking was legal and drinks imparted to such
evenings a soft, apolitical glow.